Hafslund SESAM - Easy access to information

The challange

Hafslund is Norwegian energy company. They needed to provide easier access to information for their employees. As every enterprise, Hafslund has a number of different IT systems, each of which maintains an incomplete picture of the enterprise. The full picture is nowhere to be found, because information is not connected across the different systems. Solving this is non-trivial, as traditional systems can only store data which fits their schema, and a single system for the entire enterprise is unrealistic.

The solution

Bouvet developed the system called SESAM, which collects information from different IT systems in Hafslund and integrates it into a meaningful whole. This allows users to search and browse data across system borders.

It achieves the often-sought but rarely-achieved goal of automatically enriching metadata by using semantic technologies (RDF) to extract and integrate business data from business applications. The extracted data is also indexed with a search engine together with the archived documents, allowing true enterprise search.

SESAM is actually Hafslund's internal document archive, but an archive built in an unusual way. Documents are tagged with URIs from the triple store, and these URIs connect the document metadata with enterprise data extracted from backend systems. Having the enterprise data available also allows metadata to be automatically enriched by traversing the data in the triple store. This enables the system to be much more than simply a document archive, and the longer-term vision is to fuse it with the intranet, so that SESAM becomes the primary information source of the company. It is already used by customer service representatives to look up information relevant to callers.